World Goodwill at the UN Blog

New Goals for Humanity after 2015

31 May 2013

A New Global Partnership

Today, at the UN, there was an event held
that followed the submission of a report to Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary General
of the UN. The report is titled, “A New Global Partnership:
eradicate poverty and transform economies through sustainable
development.” It is a 69 page report that was prepared by the High-Level
Panel (HLP) of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The
report can be read on http://www.post2015hlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/UN-Report.pdf

The First Step

This is a critical time at the UN as every
effort is being made to define a new plan for sustainable development.
The High Level Panel Report is the first major step in the process. In
July of 2012, Ban Kin Moon announced 27 members of the High-Level Panel to
advise on the global development framework “beyond 2015” as part of the
Secretary General’s post 2015 initiative mandated by the 2010 Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) Summit.

The panel was co-chaired by the President
of Indonesia, H.E. Dr. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the President of Liberia, H.E.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, The
Right Honourable David Cameron MP. Members included H.M. Queen Al
Abdullah of Jordan, Gisela Alonso of Cuba, Fulbert Amoussouga Gero of Benin,
Abhijit Banerjee of India, Gunilla Carlsson of Sweden, Patricia Espinosa of
Mexico, Maria Angela Holguin of Colombia, Naoto Kan of Japan, Tawakkol Karman
of Yemen, Sung-Hwan Kim of Republic of Korea, Horst Kohler of Germany, Graca
Machel of Mozambique, Betty Maina of Kenya, Elvira Nabiullina of Russian
Federation, Ngozi Okonjo-tweala of Nigeria, Andris Piebalgs of Latvia, Emilia
Pires of Timor-Leste, John Podesta of United States of America, Paul Polman of
Netherlands, Jean-Michel Severino of France, Izabella Teixeira of Brazil, Kadir
Topbas of Turkey, Yingfan Wang of China, Amina J. Mohamed of Nigeria and
appointed as ex officio.

Panel members at the meeting today
included Tawakkol Karman, Amina J. Mohamed, Emilia Pires, and John Podesta.

Reaching Out

The intention of today’s gathering was to
directly engage panelists and to provide an opportunity for the community of
attendees to share their views and their questions. It was an outreach
event. The hope is in world citizens being able to use the
recommendations presented in the High Level Panel’s report to strengthen their
own engagements within their field of service.

The meeting was moderated by Femi Oke, a
journalist who was born in Britain to Nigerian parents and has worked at CNN
and Al Jazeera. She brought a vitality to the discussion and was able to
demonstrate a mastery in moderating while keeping an eye on twitter. At
the end of the meeting, she shared, “whoooh, we are trending on twitter!”
A good thing in terms of reaching out. A connection was being made.

Five Transformative Shifts

The core of the story told today was
around five transformative shifts taking place between the MDG’s and the
recommendations being proposed. It was explained that we are at the end
of the beginning. The HLP suggests 5 transformative shifts: 1) we
can not leave anyone behind, 2) we must be sustainable, 3) we need to transform
economies, 4) we need to build peace, and 5) we need to form new partnerships.

There is also an underlying shift in the
way we will measure our achievement. The MDG’s were measured by averaging
statistics. It is being recommended that in the future, the data is
looked at in a different way with the focus being on achievement by
everyone. We can not leave anyone behind. The equality between
groups will also be taken into account. In building peace, we will need
to come up with concrete measurements. Two suggestions offered as
examples were fear from violence, and honest, effective government. The
report states that, “Targets will only be considered “achieved” if they are met
for all relevant income and social groups.”

Amina Mohamed suggested that two other
shifts were taking place. One was that we were moving from the goals
being defined on a social level to being also within a sustainable
context. And the other shift was that we were moving from north/south
development to universality.

Open for Discussion: The World We
Want

And then, the outreach was invited.
It was all open for discussion, directly engaging the panelists: Michael
Andersen from the UK, Samuel Jackson from Liberia, Yanuar Nugroho from Indonesia,
and Amina Mohamed, Special Advisor of the UN Secretary-General on Post-2015
Development Planning.

The transformation of the economy seemed
to be the underlying current of comments and questions and discussion.
The economic transformation needed to be inclusive, and sustainable, and
equitable, calling for the development of an infrastructure to support
it. It was suggested that all stakeholders be included. And toward
that end, the new infrastructure would need to promote an intercommunity around
the world. So, in effect, yet another shift was being suggested, within
the discussion, from intergovernmental to intercommunity.

It was suggested that women were at the
center of development and that they needed to be integrated and to have
universal access and economic empowerment. Women and youth were seen as
carriers of change. We need to have “good employment” and improve
business by reducing corruption and inequality.

It was voiced that economic growth is not
the solution, but can be the problem. We can’t have growth for the sake
of growth, but it needs to be people centered. It can’t be business as
usual. Our focus needs to be on well being and not on GDP growth.
We need to have a human development index. The view was presented that
the so called developed countries are not developed because there is not an
aspiration to that quality of life. It may be of interest to note the link
to UNDP Human Development Reports - http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/

Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, “the mother of
the revolution” and a recipient of the Nobel peace prize, suggested that we
need to measure transparency and accountability in order to have good
governance. Peace is needed to drive development. She also sees a
need for each of us to identify ourselves as global citizens. “Arab
spring was for the world” She told us that it was good to dream and it is
good to achieve our dreams. She shared that she had met with the
Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon and that she told him, “Mr. President, your
report has to be much stronger than this.” Her sharing met with applause.

The panel told us that the High Level
Report is simply one step in the process of defining the development goals for
humanity. Much more work is needed in determining how to measure
accountability, and how to integrate the aging population. We were told
the plan discusses people and not citizens because there are so many of us that
are displaced, not being included in the system. In response to the
question “where is the money to do these things?” we were told that we have
enough money, “the money is just in the wrong place.”

It's Up To Us

We were reminded that the High Level
Panel’s report was meant to inspire. It is not a treaty. We have big
global challenges and the world needs to come together to solve them.

Homi Kharas who spent 26 years at the
World Bank and is now a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director in the Global Economy
and Development program of the Brookings Institute, told us that it is about
the quality of growth. And in concluding the discussion, he told us that
the goals need to be locally owned. It’s up to us to help create the
world we want.

The High Level Panel is just one part of
the process. We can continue to
explore the world we want in terms of the trends and outcomes of gender, age,
education and the overall human development index with the link - http://www.worldwewant2015.org/HLPREPORT